Smell the Oranges
by HospitallerInaBoat
Summary: Sometimes all it takes is a sweet scent to change everything. But having a big booty in front of you helps too. (M!Human x F!Charizard)
1. Chapter 1 - Cut

_**Story depicts blood, language, in-depth discussion of suicide and depression, detailed interspecies sex and the lot, if you can't cope with any of that, you know where the door is**_

_**The Pokemon in this world are ANTHRO, 90% of what I do is anthro, that's it**_

_**Remember to find me on FurAffinity, Deviantart, Wattpad, P treon, Twitter and Discord**_

* * *

🍊**Smell the Oranges **🍊

**1**

* * *

**Cut**

* * *

**_"The world doesn't care. But perhaps, with the right kind of company, it doesn't matter if it does or doesn't."_**

The belt didn't work. As soon as he secured it around his neck, tucked in the loop, and then hooked it to the ceiling fan, it snapped after only a minute, and he ate his bedroom floor.

For a while, after the first attempt, Mitchell was caught in a kind of ballistic stupor. It sure as shit felt like someone had damn near missed him with a bomb. There was a ringing upon the air that only he could hear, that and the pervasive, never-ending whispers of madness that _this was never going to end._

Circles and circles. Round in circles.

He'd had enough.

So, after stewing and mewling on his bedroom floor, he bustled down the hall, and tried to use the kitchen knife. Both wrists, a quick drag and slash to sever the skin and open up the arteries. The young man spent probably forty five seconds watching the white-tile floor turn itself crimson before he started to cry.

Mitchell examined his own life whilst it sluggishly seeped from his ruined wrists. The blood was so thick and deep, that it actually looked black. And there was _a lot of it._ Mitchell didn't know he had that much blood in his body to begin with.

A hundred different voices in his mind screamed at him that everything he had just done was wrong, and impulsive, and selfish. But somewhere, through all that mishmash was a tiny speaker, one whose words were but a whisper that relented to him simply:

"_Now it can end._"

-And really- damning his family, damning his friends and his shallow life -_that_ was really all he had ever wanted. Thusly, no. He did not try to bind the wounds. No, he did not call for help and he did not move. He watched himself bleed to death. And watching himself bleed to death felt almost satisfactory, for here was the chance to show the world how it had wronged him, and how it was _its_ fault that he was like this, and how it was the cause and reason that he had done this to himself.

_Fuck this place._

There wasn't even a point, and the floor wasn't feeling so bitterly cold anymore, like his heart. It was very wet and warm as the blood seeped into his sleep-pants and turned its gray cloth scabby brown.

"_Now it can end. Now it can **end**. Now, it can-"_

Mitchell didn't even realize it when he had passed out. The transition to darkness skipped his memory. He never recalled when exactly he had stopped staying awake, or when the front door to his house had been ripped clean from its hinges, and his ultimate goal was denied to him.

Flickerings of recollected scenes were the only survivors in the blurry mess of his head afterwards. The pale interior of what appeared to a vehicle, strangers in his home, a familiar, rotund and orange mass constantly staying glued to his flank and never leaving, like the signature of a creator marking every painting they made. It was always there, every time his opened his eyes, reaching out for him every time he descended back into the dark.

Later on, Mitchell woke up in a white room, with white windows, white chairs, and a white bed with very papery sheets. He was in a back-opened gown, his feet were bare, and- looking at his wrists -proved that it was because of….

_Stitches. I.V probe._

Mitchell smiled.

It was not a grateful smile. As soon as he lowered his arm, the hospital cot creaking as he sank back into the pillows beneath him, his gaze became fixated on a familiar, immense and orange shape taking up most of the west wing of the room.

It was Saedi, his Pokemon friend, a Charizard with flushed orange eyes, trembling wings, and a great tail that was curled around her ankles solemnly.

The dragon's snout was puffy and red, and her face showed the results of what most likely was a full night, morning and early day of continuous crying. Her shoulders heaved the moment they made eye contact, and her mouth opened as she tried to say something.

"God damn it, you bitch."

Saedi jolted, like she had stuck one of her talons in an outlet. Her mouth was still agape, but all that was coming out was air.

After Mitchell spoke, he realized what he had said and felt the emotional chaos collapse upon him like a tumbling building. The young man went entirely blank as his lip quivered, and a single tear fled down the pale roundness of his cheek.

Saedi moved, the tortured chair under her immense backside creaking and voicing its complaints. She tried to say something again, but Mitchell beat her to it.

"Get out." He told her.

Saedi- for all her girth –was but a breeze in the room. The Charizard swept up from the chair, snatched her purse, and vanished through the doorframe, ducking and compressing her wings to manage the transition as she desperately bit down on her lower-chop to prevent herself making the sobs too loud. A startled man in a white coat and black shoes gasped and stepped from her path when she reached the door.

The doctor narrowly dodged getting run over, and turned to watch her in a bewildered fashion as she vanished outside into the hall. The window beside the door was too small for Mitchell to see where she went the moment she crossed the arch.

After that, just as quickly as she had arrived back into his life, she was gone again. The doctor's gaze lingered outside the frame for a good while. He used a finger to adjust the bridge of his glasses, and let the scene go with an ashen, low sigh under his breath as he stepped into the room.

"Mr. Hoems," He smiled as he crossed over to Mitchell's beside. He had green eyes behind those spectacles of his. They were so round and huge that he looked straight out of a Potter-Party bonanza. "I'm Doctor Elmreed, I've been responsible for your care since you were admitted."

Mitchell opened his mouth to speak, but all that came out was a tiny whistle.

The young man crumpled up under the sheets, like a dying insect curling into a ball.

"Mr. Hoems?" Elmreed asked.

"…_A-Admitted?_" Mitchell managed to dryly croak.

"Yes." Elmread said carefully, fingers drumming on a clipboard in his hands as he glanced past his glasses to read some details to himself. "You came in about three hours ago. You were picked up by an ambulance in your home, correct?"

"I don't remember." Mitchell found enough of his voice to sound competent but still dejected. Elmread's eyes flickered between him and the papers, before he continued speaking.

"Have you had memory trouble in the past?"

"No." Mitchell narrowed his eyes.

"I beg your pardon, Mr. Hoems, I just have standard questions I have to ask everyone." Elmread said with friendly intent. "You could've come in here with a splinter in your thumb, and I still would have the same list, so to speak."

Mitchell gave a dry hum to match the doctor's attempt at humor.

"…So," Elmread flattened the board to his lower belly, smiling down at him patiently. "-what the hell happened to you?"

Mitchell swallowed, feeling fresh agitation seep into his system from the doctor's zany efforts to connect with him.

"Which hospital did she bring me to?" Mitchell grumbled. He coughed, noticing for the first time that his throat was intensely dry. After a few wheezes, Elmreed quickly stepped over to a nearby sink and filled a little plastic cup with tap, offering it to him. "Thankyou."

"Of course. And you're in Rocksman Hospital, Mr. Hoems. It was the closest building in relation to your home."

"The one north of Middle Country?" Mitchell placed the cup on his bedside nightstand.

"The one and only." Elmreed nodded. "Your Charizard friend is the one who brought you in. She put in the call."

"I know." Mitchell mumbled solemnly, glancing down at his wrists. Medical dressings covered them, and they dully ached.

"Both of your wrists had been slashed open, and you had suffered considerable blood loss. We stitched you back up and have been providing continuous dosages of fluids. You also had to undergo a small transfusion, simply due to the severity of your injuries." Elmread explained, pointing to the I.V. erected by the bed. "I don't mean to sound rude, Mr. Hoems, but we weren't able to get much out of you when you came in through the ER. You were quite… off. Excuse me for saying: delirious."

"Mmhm." Mitchell rubbed a thumb tenderly down one of the bandages.

"Your Charizard friend-"

"Her name is Saedi." He glared up at the doctor. "Use her name."

"Of course." Elmreed smiled patiently. "Ms. Saedi also did not offer us much information. She did say that this wasn't your first visit to the hospital. I looked through our associate's records, but I would like to ask you personally about it. Is this true?"

"I don't know, you looked in the files, those don't lie, right?" Mitchell spat. "Hasn't everyone been to a hospital at least once?"

"Certainly, Mr. Hoems, but I'm speaking of the last three visits you've had recently."

"Define recently."

"Over the course of two years, give or take." Elmreed said. "Two instances aren't on record-"

"Because they weren't important." Mitchell shook his head.

"Ah, maybe just a slip on the floor. Perhaps?"

"None of your business."

"…A-hah." Elmreed shifted on his heels, mulling over his next words. His tongue clicked as he opened his mouth to speak again. "You almost died." He summarized.

"Yeah, and?" Mitchell chuffed. "Shit happens. You should know, given where you work."

"Well, given where I work," Elmreed smiled again. "it's my job to understand why someone comes into my care half bled-to-death."

"I had an accident." Mitchell said, fiddling under the papery sheets. Doctor Elmread blinked stupidly.

"An _accident?_" He quipped.

"Correct."

"Two very clear incisions made across the arterial underside of both wrists is not what I call an-"

"It was an accident. That is all I am telling you. Finish what you have to do and discharge me as soon as the procedures are done." The young man orchestrated it all like it was a meal he had ordered many times at a common eatery. A listed script. Elmreed had the tactical genius of a doornail, but he wasn't a fool. Those who had been around the bend had ways of coping with it after awhile. "State law says you can't hold me unless I'm a present danger to myself or anyone around me. I admit to nothing. I have no thoughts of self-harm or harming anyone else. You don't believe me? Pull up police records. I don't even have a speeding ticket."

"I figured that, you don't seem the type." Elmread frowned.

"Oh," Mitchell gave him a terrible and mean grin. "-you can _read people_, huh?"

"Not really." Elmread creased his lip. "What about you?"

"Stop trying to be my friend." Mitchell went back to rubbing his dressings.

"I don't want to be your friend, Mr. Hoems, I want to ensure that you don't end up somewhere dead, and that's just because I value humanitarian deceny." Doctor Elmreed cheerily corrected him. "So I'll ask again: cut the shit. We can both make this process a little less agonizing than it's already been."

"You want something to list as a cause?" Mitchell growled angrily. "You have your reason. It was a _accident_. My hands slipped while I was handling a cutting knife in my freaking kitchen, and that's it. Are you calling me a liar?"

"I'm not calling you anything, Mr. Hoems." Elmreed retained his composure, sounding lofty, calm. Mitchell resented him for it. "…Well, we still have some ways to go before we can talk about releasing you. How about I organize for you some references, and we can prevent _accidents_ in the future?"

"Keep your references." Mitchell snapped. "Finish your tests, your fluid drips, and whatever else you have to do. I want to leave."

Elmreed looked defeated. He couldn't even muster a good response, and simply nodded. He looked down at his clipboard for a moment longer to find some excuse for standing there, and with a tired huff, the doctor spiraled around to trot back for the door.

"Oh, Mr. Hoems?" He stopped in the frame. "I realize you're probably far from being in the right mood, but you have more visitors. They're very concerned about your _accident._"

If the doctor had made one more insinuation, Mitchell would've probably stood up and punched him in the mouth. However, just as Saedi had done to Elmreed leaving the room, two older folk repeated almost flattening poor Elmreed in the doorframe coming in.

Shouldering past the doctor and storming across the room in a heartbeat, Mitchell's mother screamed at the top of her lungs, and promptly smacked her son across the face. Mitchell took it and said nothing, not even as Mrs. Hoems fell to her knees sobbing, and Mr. Hoems painfully crouched beside her, his very tired eyes locked somewhere in the midpoint between his wife and his son.

Mitchell let her have her moment. He let his father have it to. But he wouldn't let them believe that he was sorry. He was only sorry that it hadn't worked. The young man looked out the dark hospital room window, a contrast to all the bright white where everything there was dull and complete black. The highway netted through the forest below, populated with pairs of little Christmas-lights as cars zipped down the lanes.

The guests chair sat before the glass, empty, with two very large butt-prints working their ways out of the leather cushion. The smell of citrus was still consistent in the air too. It was almost as if Saedi was still here with him.

He wished she was.

* * *

[🍊]

Mr. Hoems didn't say much. He rarely ever did. It had been that way since Mitchell was small. His father wasn't a talker, and he certainly wasn't an understand-er either. Mitchell's brother thought he was evil.

And was he?

Perhaps, depending on who you asked obviously. Mitchell personally, didn't know how he would respond to someone who asked such a question. His dad was… his dad, and there wasn't much more to it_._

He just didn't know whether that was good or bad anymore.

"Does everything fit?" Mr. Hoems asked, gesturing to Mitchell on the other side of the table. An untouched cup of coffee steamed just underneath his chin as he fiddled with his fingers.

Mitchell only nodded, chewing on his bagel like a starved cow. It tasted pretty decent, considering it came from a hospital café in the master lobby of Rocksman. It felt like nobody ever had anything good to say about Rocksman, both the place and the staff. They were generally regarded as only adequate boobs who could keep you from dying. Past that, just _maybe_ they could save the limb. Maybe. And that was where all the shittalk started, especially online.

But apparently, their food wasn't as shitty as their service. It was just as adequate and made of the same strategy they used when approaching concern for their patients' wellbeing.

At least there was something the sons of bitches could list as an A-plus.

"What, did you guys stop at Walmart or something?" Mitchell sipped the last of his iced tea and ate the final bite of his bagel all in what appeared to be one motion. His father was too busy looking over the gray T-shirt and the sweats his son was now wearing to notice.

"I went out after we drove here. The doctors told us you didn't have any clothes because your sleepwear got soa-" His voice broke. "…You didn't have any clothes. I bought you some. It's better than the rags the nurses would pull out."

"Uh-huh." Mitchell tapped his fingers on the table, looking down at his lap. "I needed a new night-shirt anyways. All my others are for the day."

"Jesus, Mitchell." His father was developing a sob, but hacked it at the throat and silenced it. He instead opted to bite his knuckle and huff.

Mitchell scrutinized the old man with a disapproving gaze. Time hadn't been friendly to his father. Mr. Hoems Senior was a squalid, tanned, and gigantic wrinkle. Crowsfeet scattered around his eyes like the breaking surface of a pond of water, his once vibrant and big arms had degraded into thin, pathetic strips of bone hugged by skin. He'd lost weight dramatically over the last decade. So much so that Mitchell almost felt sorry for eating the bagel himself and not giving it to his dad instead.

Of course, that generosity vanished as soon as it had appeared. His father had it coming. It was the price he paid for not bothering to kick his alcoholism for most of his life.

In the backdrop, working behind one of the food counters was a Lucario who looked almost as miserable as Mitchell did. She had her head bowed as she texted away on her phone with her thumb. Hidden behind the register in the quarter-filled and quiet café, she could get away with it.

Honestly, he wasn't surprised by her lack of care for the few times his father had started getting emotional, what with the two of them sitting at one of the tables closest to the counter. She'd probably seen people drop dead in here, for all he knew, given where they were.

"Where's Rob?" Mitchell asked out of the blue. Robert was his younger brother.

"Not here." His father sighed again, wheezing. "He isn't here because I couldn't find him. And neither could your mother. He's just one son we already feel like we've lost."

"He lost himself." Mitchell shook his head. "I give Rob credit for not showing up. I know you at least had the decency to leave him a message. Or am I wrong?"

"This isn't about that." Mr. Hoems grit his teeth. A few nearby people started to glance at them. All visitors. That Lucario chick could've had a bomb thrown at her and she probably wouldn't even have blinked. Such was the results of the horrors of retail, he supposed… His dad made a visible effort to control his temper and started again. "Robert is a confused young man, and frankly, so are you."

"I'm just in shit's creek, dad. Rob's an asshole."

"Don't talk about him that way."

"Why not? What right do you have to tell me how to speak about him? You don't even know him."

Mr. Hoems' jaw flapped once. He couldn't speak and his own son scoffed him with a click of his tongue.

Yeah, no.

He definitely didn't feel bad about the bagel at all. His father was still unable to control his inner-douchebag that kept resurfacing.

"Here's the difference, dad; I hate Rob because he's a dick. You hate him because he's gay." Mitchell said. "I just wish for once, you'd come find me and find something else to talk about. And I wish mom would stop running the fuck away."

His mother wasn't even in the hospital anymore. She'd screamed at him, cried, told him how much she loved him, and then… she left. Like she always did whenever stress levels were high and the cruel face of reality was rearing its ass-ugly mug.

She'd left when Robert had that fight with dad. She'd left when _Mitchell_ had had his fight with dad. She was a runner. Mitchell just didn't have the patience for it anymore.

"Thanks for the bagel." He stood up from the table and dusted his hands off. His father couldn't even look up at him. By god, had he gotten older too throughout all of this, forgetting the weight loss. They used to joke back in better days that he was so dark that he almost looked Hispanic. His father still had that complexion, just now it was etched with those wrinkles and deep set intrusions of grit. The exterior of his hazel eyes was cracked and his dusty brown hair was turning grey.

Mr. Hoems did nothing as his son walked out of the café, yanking at the sleeves of his shirt so that no one else would see the stitches.

* * *

[🍊]

Saedi had her snout on her wrist the whole drive. She didn't utter a peep, she just kept a paw on the wheel and focused on the road. The radio was turned off, and so the interior of the SUV was awash in a tender silence.

Mitchell stole glances at her every now and again but didn't feel confident enough to dive for the apology that was oh-so-needed here. He felt very small, and not just because she was driving one of those larger-statured Pokemon designed automobiles.

Truthfully, Saedi was like a soccer-mom when it came to the road. She kept an uncomfortably far distance from every car she came up on, drove like a ninety-year-old grandpa in his twilight years, and treated school speed zones like they were buffer points under the gaze of Christ or something. On top of that, she drove the perfect car for it all. A big ole' Ford. A _Pokemon Ford._ Friggin' truck was big enough to be classified as an armored vehicle in some Third-World countries. Wasn't it this model that Mexican Drug Cartels were running around in bolting .50's to the beds?

They hit a small bump, but it was enough to yank him out his thoughts. He looked over at Saedi again. The Charizardess looked positively drained and miserable. All the color from her face was gone, except for the pink flush on her snout and her cheeks from all the crying. Her buxom body- barely concealed in those tight-fit V-neck shirt and jeans –was curled in on itself, like it was a wilting flower. Her tailplane was minute in the rear seats as it snaked through the hole in the spine of her chair.

"I called you a bitch." Mitchell spoke, sounding unsure.

Saedi's eye flicked, considering him for a millisecond before gluing back onto the windshield. The Charizard slowly huffed, her narrow shoulders hefting and sagging.

"Yes, you did." She muttered, her usually frail voice now overtaken with grim resolve.

"Why did I do that?"

More importantly; who the fuck was he asking? He didn't know what else to say! This was all so much beyond just a simple apology. For who Saedi was to him? This was… this was madness. How dare he talk to her like that.

"I don't know why you did that." Saedi shrugged as if it had been some kind of petty accident, like he had bumped her in the side with his shoulder or something. Her lower jaw quivered. "But it hurt."

"I'm sorry." He mumbled.

"You better be."

She'd obviously come to some decision about something in all this mess. Mitchell guaranteed that the solution was going to be very painful for him.

Of course, Saedi would never hurt a fly. It was the possibility for something… something like what happened with _Robert_, that terrified him. Where did it honestly go from here? Who the hell knew.

This had all been so serene. Trying again and failing wasn't necessarily earth-shattering (it was for everyone _but_ him, obviously) –but seeing his parents again? Jesus, it had been months, maybe a year or more. He had forgotten what they looked like, but he hadn't at the same time if that made sense.

And Saedi.

He hadn't seen her in a long time too, ever since she had moved out.

He tried to hide it as his eyes stung from daggering into the corner of his face. He didn't want her to see that he was looking at her.

As the amber lights of the highway passed overhead, her orange, scaly skin flared every few seconds with each post gone by. Her emerald-colored eyes sparkled in the dark, but none of the light that they had had in her younger years was there anymore. It had been buried a long time ago, or at least dulled.

_She smells like oranges._

Mitchell closed his eyes and leaned back in the seat, trying to drown out the last few hours with the crisp aroma the Charizard always gave off. Saedi was a citrus fiend. Her paws always smelled like oranges because she constantly snacked on them and clementines and grapefruits like they were going out of style. Her perfume that she used smelled like oranges, and the mascara she had on was dark orange in color. So was her lower lip's balm.

Adding in all of that to the little hoop-piercings lining down each of her scalp-fins, and in addition to smelling like a fruit basket, Saedi wasn't half bad to look at. Mitchell had always known that though. His Charizard was beautiful, she always had been, and he had always been a spoiled, miserable little shit for being so ungrateful about it.

They had met when Mitchell was in fifth grade and she was still a Charmander. Saedi had been the gym teachers' little assistant, and she worked for all the classes on towel-duty and equipment set up during meets. Mitchell volunteered to help out the gym teachers too after a few conversations with her. He was practically addicted to the reptile, especially after high school came around, and they had first had sex in the back of the bleachers outside the track rim when he was sixteen and she was eighteen.

That had happened before the crash he'd gone through after school. Four years graduated and what did he have to name for himself? Lots of grief, three hospital visits, and a lot of simmering crap.

_Four hospital visits now._ He really needed to stop trying to use belts.

"Mitchell, stop." Saedi's depressed voice quietly uttered out over the muffled growl of the engine. Mitchell glanced down at her lap and gasped when he realized he had kept a hand on her thigh for the last few minutes. "I don't… I don't think I'm ready for that anytime soon."

"Ready for what." –He stammered like a moron, retracting back in his own seat like a child discovered mid-scheme.

That was pretty kind of her to say it like that. Personally, Mitchell- if he was her –would've told himself he was out of his mind for even insinuating the possibility of _anything_ happening after what he said to her.

_God damn it, you bitch._

His own words echoed in his mind repeatedly and he couldn't get them to stop.

"I'm amazed they discharged me so early." He said aloud, trying to change the subject.

"I'm amazed they discharged you." Saedi said, her inhuman, draconic voice monotone. "I'm guessing you told them it was an accident."

"You didn't tell them it _wasn't._" He glanced at her.

"No." She lazily shook her head, expression tired. "What would be the point? You'd never accept treatment, they'd force you to stay there for a few days, transport you to a center, and then you'd stay there for a week or so, and then you'd come home and do it all over again."

"Would you have rather me go through their idea of _help_ again? Locking someone in a ward with no windows for a week doesn't help anyone. Our system's corrupt as hell." He shot back.

"You're right, the way mental health is treated is lackluster." Saedi sighed. "Maybe this time we can talk about alternatives."

"Alternatives." He parroted. "I thought we were done with the pill-talks?"

For just a moment, like a thin wave of ocean water lapping against a shoreline, this pure and unadulterated flare of boundless rage passed over her draconic face. The leather on the wheel crinkled as her claws tightened on the grip, and the back of the SUV started to become daytime as the fire on the end of her tail grew to five times its normal size.

But then, Saedi twitched, and all the fury bled from her in an instant. She shivered, sighed out her nose as she shifted in her seat, and the fire in the back cooled.

"Mitchell, medication will help you." She said, after collecting herself. "We just need to figure out the right kind to give you, and the right amount. You need to give the medication a chance before just cutting it off."

"Medication doesn't do anything." Mitchell grumbled. "It's a waste of money and time and I won't do it."

"You need to let us help you."

"_Us?_"

"Your mother and father love you." Saedi held her nose up, trying to contain her emotions. "A-And I- … I want to help you more than anything. Don't you understand that?"

"_Help? _Fine, you _can_ help me." Mitchell snapped. "How about dowsing me in some fire and letting the flames do the work for me next time?"

He grunted as an uncontrolled force shoved him into the interior of the car door. A sedan blared on their horn and flew around them as Saedi tore off the road, and drove over the highway's grass, nosing her SUV to the shoulder and yanking the stick to PARK. The moment she was no longer viable to causing an accident, she gripped her own face and sobbed. She produced a sound that was so pathetic. It couldn't possibly have come from someone so big and strong as her. The Charizard buried her face in her paws and heaved horribly, crying her heart out, ruining her mascara, raining silvery tears from between her talons.

Mitchell cried too. He cried because of everything that had happened. And he cried because his pain was not only his own, and he so easily forgot that.

"_M-Mitchell,_" Saedi wailed, the larger Charizard leaned over the middle console and planted her snout into his side, hugging him, wedging his shoulder between those big, cream-colored tits he used to be so wild about. "-_I love you~! I love you so much. Isn't that enough? What else do you want? Tell me! I'll do anything if you just stop this._"

She pawed at him and constricted him, rocking the whole car, her citrusy smell overwhelming him as her warm, plush and scaly girth wolfed down the whole left side of his body.

"_Please,_" She mewled. "_I'll do a-anything…_"

Mitchell held onto her tight. She was all he had left.

* * *

[🍊]


	2. Chapter 2 - Lonely Nights

**Smell the Oranges**

**2**

* * *

**Lonely Nights**

* * *

They had propped the door back in its frame apparently. What else were a bunch of paramedics really supposed to do? It wasn't like they were part-time contractors on top of it.

Mitchell didn't bother going through the front of his poor little house. He used his keys for the back door and firstly reemerged via the dining room instead of his lobby. It was quite dark, as all the lamps and the ceiling fan light were turned off. He stared at the fan for a moment before flicking the wall switch, snorting as he waltzed inside.

Saedi had to duck through the frame (as she normally did) and she wouldn't take her gaze off her own sandals. She appeared meek for someone her size as she deposited her handbag on the table, her thick tail undulating in syrupy arcs behind her. It normally only did that when she was deep in thought. Mitchell was so fucked right now though that he couldn't even begin to fathom what she was thinking about, even though he probably already knew.

But then again, he didn't even know what he _himself_ was thinking. The last few hours were a blur and the depth of it all hadn't quite hit him yet.

It had taken the hospital somewhere around thirty-size hours to finally let him out. Waiting all day in the room, running tests, passing a physical, and taking pain medication had been the drill. At least now it was over. Now he could get to the hard part: the aftermath.

Snorting, he found his nasal-cavity was clogged from the crying in Saedi's car. He drove a knuckle over the bridge of his nose he walked into the kitchen. The blood puddle was still there. It was wide enough that three people could lie in it side to side and still have wiggle room.

Behind him, the buxom Charizard started weeping silently in the room behind him.

"Just give me a few minutes." He mumbled, stepping back into the dining area and pulling a chair out for her. Saedi had her snout in her claws again, so she stumbled to the chair blindly and fell in it with a heavy _thwack~!_ -that saw a noticeable hip-ripple even through the jeans.

Mitchell came back from the bathroom and handed her a box of tissues. She felt for it a few times before taking it and hugging the thing without actually using any of them. She kept moaning and heaving and shivering as if she was cold.

She was supposed to be a heat-type, for crying out loud. Where was the logic in that? Though, he supposed depression was, at its core, pretty damned cold. Didn't he already have enough reasons to hate himself?

Even destroyed, however, Saedi still got to him. Her citrus scent was sweltering and strong, and heat still radiated off of her body like she was a living toaster oven. Mitchell had to tear himself from her to go into the bathroom. He picked out a bunch of rags, a mop, some towels and an army's worth of cleaner before setting to work, obscuring his Charizard's wonderful smell with the oxidized chemical bliss of multipurpose spray.

Blood became like caramel when it started to coagulate and get foul. It became somewhat solid, and it stuck to shit like how boogers would. Half the job was scraping. The other half was dealing with the noticeable pigmentation it left behind. The center of his kitchen looked like a murder scene, and all he had to battle with it were modern-day tidiness implements and time, _lots and lots of time_.

"I called somebody about the door for you." Saedi uttered in the archway to the kitchen, the taller Charizardess hunching as she dealt with the lower stature of his ceiling. She was playing with her fin-piercings, flicking them like they were keys on a chime. "They should give you a call back on Monday."

"Thankyou." Mitchell tossed the last rag into the little laundry area north of the tile. He sat back and crossed his legs, his eyes darting around the now glistening patch of floor that had been so macabre in its previous décor.

"I could've helped you." The dragon flicked her rings.

"I wouldn't have wanted you to." Mitchell looked over his shoulder at her. "You didn't have to call for the door either. I could've done that."

"Not where you were." She smiled, but that turned into a frown a second later. Frankly, it was amazing she possessed even the energy to discuss anything after all that had happened.

He supposed that was his fault. But when you were where he was, as she put it, whenever something horrible happened, you didn't react much to it. Shit tended to stack after awhile. He'd prodded death's ass and hollered. Emotionally wrecking his friends and family was the least destructive thing in the overall scheme of his personal career.

Could he say Saedi was really only a _friend?_

What was she exactly? Acquaintance? Fuck-buddy? Probably more of the latter mixed in with a bit of secretary.

She didn't need him to tell her that she could do and deserved so much better.

There were still bits of wood and screws all over the lobby floor. A noticeable drag was made on the carpet, most likely from the edge of the actual door when Saedi had used her inhuman strength to shoulder it off its hinges. He spent a good while picking up the mess and throwing it in a garbage bag. Saedi stood in the arch to the kitchen and watched.

"If you had actually done it." She said, right as Mitchell was tying up the garbage bag. "What would you have accomplished?"

"I don't know." Mitchell shrugged, his face like concrete, perpetually shrugging downwards in an eternal frown. He'd been like that for over two years, but it had all really started since the weird half-estrangement he had going on with his own family. "I don't know what I can say to you."

"Oh, it's… it is what it is, right?" Saedi offered the sourest sounding laugh she could muster, and she bit into her knuckles enough to leave bruises, her lower lip quivering up a storm again. "You've come to a place where nothing anyone ever does or says is enough for you, and I suppose there isn't a whole lot I can do to change that."

Her eyes were glued to the human as he trudged over to the back door again and chucked the quarter-full bag outside. It wrapped off the bin audibly and crunched onto the patio. He slammed the door shut and didn't bother fixing it.

"But, anyway… life goes on, indefatigably." Saedi wiped a stray tear from her swollen, crimson cheek and sat down at his kitchen table, digging into her purse for what proved to be her phone. It was a little flip-phone. One of those shitty LG black nuggets that kids in their high school used to keep in their unbelted-pants. Even as an adult she was pretty old-fashioned.

That was probably why, a year ago when Mitchell had tried to say every horrible thing he could muster to her and tell her to find a better partner, she'd stuck around.

Something about a really big appreciation of monogamy.

Mitchell never took his Charizard as a die-hard Catholic, but then again, neither had Saedi herself. He'd never forget when that little Filipino man at the train platform had thrust a bible in her face, and she had told him to go to hell.

"I'm canceling your appointment tomorrow." She said, keys clicking fortuitously on the little pad. She was really precise with those caramel talons of hers. He'd learned that from the tenderness she always had, especially when she used to give him handjobs.

She stopped doing that when he jokingly said she was- "_choking the bishop" _-. It probably hadn't been a good idea to say that just a few days after he tried the belt for the first time.

But then again, sex was trivial in Mitchell's head.

Son of a bitch, why hadn't the knives done it? Look at how much blood he'd lost. The kitchen looked like a Kaiju had had her period right over the floor.

"Did you hear me?"

Mitchell coughed and sat in the opposite chair. "-No, say it again, I'm sorry."

"I said I'm canceling your appointment." Saedi's green eyes flickered up for a second without her snout following. She appeared studious over her phone, moving time blocks around in an otherwise busy schedule. "Do you remember? You were going to the dentist before you tried to slash yourself open again."

Huh. That took balls, even if she didn't have them. Normally, comments like that sent her into a tear storm.

Saedi looked so miserable in that little kitchen chair though. She probably didn't have any tears left after today. Her eyes were puffy, and the millions of tiny little velvety scales covering her shielded nothing of the flush.

And it was astonishing that she knew his schedule so completely, even when they weren't living together.

"So that's out the window." She doomed the appointment with a few clicks and an apt note to remind herself to call in the morning. "I'll set up an estimate with Home Depot for a new door, and we'll give Leo down at the architect's office a ring to see if the wall needs to be replaced too. But I don't think it does…"

Saedi was talking herself through it, every now again, pausing to wipe away a tear with her thumb, or let her jaw loosen so it could quiver without inhibition. Mitchell reached over the table and cupped her wrists.

"Saedi." He croaked.

"I'll call the university tomorrow too and let them know I am out of action, as the saying goes." She sniffed and clicked the last key. "And I'll let Bridget know that I'm not coming home tonight because of my crazy human boyfriend, and his continuous efforts to destroy me."

"Saedi-"

"Oh, shush, Mitchell." The Charizard brushed his hands away and stuffed her phone back in her purse, staring down at the little handbag with an expression that Mitchell could only understand as one of loathing. She swept a thumb over her eye and clicked her fangs when it came back burnt orange. "I would give so much for a day to go by where my makeup actually survives. Did you know that? I haven't seen it. There hasn't been a day where my makeup has died because of soap and water. It's always something before either of those."

Mitchell stood up with her and crossed around the table. But the whole thing was a charade. He was half-trying to win a race she was deliberately putting in his way. He had the distinct suspicion that the Charizard felt sick at the idea of him touching her more than he already had.

"Does your shower still work?" She zipped up her bag and adjusted her strained shirt. Saedi leaned a bit closer and sniffed the air around him, grunting. "It seems like it is, aside from the hospital-smell."

Mitchell could only nod. He felt like a corpse being tugged around on ventriloquist strings.

"Just give me fifteen minutes and I'll be right back. Then I'll get you to bed on time."

She sounded like his mother.

Or rather, how his mother _should've_ sounded.

He mumbled that she didn't need to rush and that she could be in the bathroom as long as she needed.

For a second, the façade of her rage was broken, and the Charizardess' face softened, her brow twitched, and before either of them knew it, her unbelievably warm and soft paws had shot up and were now caressing his jaw. There were sometimes through all the blackness, that little bits and pieces of the boy she used to know shined through with dominance.

But that too faded. Saedi stifled a cry and vanished inside the little one-person bathroom on the other side of the bungalow. He heard the lock click and water start to run. Then the evil, oppressive silence began to gnaw at his belly in its swift return.

His house felt haunted sometimes, all dark, and alone on most nights. Just having a presence wander in its depths with him was enough to elicit an uncertain swell of anxiety in his breast. Nights like these confused him, as bridges were formed over the immense gap. How could he keep wishing for death if reasons to live kept coming to him and kissing him? Even after all that had happened.

It was kinda' annoying.

* * *

[🍊]

They showered separately. It was an oddity that was becoming common. He intermittently went from seating himself on the floor where he had cleaned up all the blood, to melting into the couch and watching television. There was nothing on, of course. He left a car show running for a while, marveling at the old models and gleaming paint.

The barest semblance of a smile started to appear on his face. But then, the camera swiveled, showing the slim, beautiful model-girls meant to accentuate each vehicle's flavor. They were sleek and trained in their movements, paid simply to exist, to be standing next to what was deemed more important. One of them winked, and although the women were human, it stunk just a little too much of a life he had abandoned. He quickly changed the channel.

Mitchell had always had a thing for cars. He had once been saving money to buy himself a Trans Am Firebird. Most of that cash was still sitting in his account, rotting. He had lost most of his financial concentrations by this point. It didn't pay to follow through with dreams when living wasn't worth it to him.

At least, that was most of the time.

Mitchell drank some fruit juice from the fridge and glanced over the flank of the sofa. His house phone was on the table, still and silent, like a forgotten chunk of icy ruin. He was half-expecting a call from… _someone._ One of his parents, Robert even, or maybe one of the sporadic fair-weather buds' he kept on the edges of his social life.

But no. Nobody called. Not even someone from the hospital, or a cop, or anything. It was like what had happened had just been edited out. Like it was blank space. A void.

Mitchell blinked when his bathroom door opened in the back of the house. Soft, fleshy pads on the floor grew in volume until Saedi emerged from the shadowy darkness of the evening interior. She had one of his bath towels wrapped over her enticingly fleshy draconic body. Even being where he was, Mitchell wasn't going to stop himself from getting an eyeful. Saedi wasn't borderline anorexic like he was, and she had cream-colored boobs that were big enough to weigh down a battleship.

The Charizard had her phone in her claw as she trotted over to the couch, rumbling the whole floor of the house when she fell into the cushions right beside him. The neighboring cushion was almost ejected, and him with it. Mitchell had to grab the arm and ride out a literal wave of Pokebooty-born force.

Now felt like an awfully awkward time to get a boner. But, strangely, that didn't feel too out of place either. What had his life been exactly, besides work, feeling horrendous about himself, and getting chumpies from either Saedi when she was feeling easy, or copious folders of internet porn?

When life destroyed who you were, it gave you ample ammunition to keep feeding the negativity. He supposed he would be considered _lucky_ by many, that his ammunition was alive, warm, and hot as fuck. At least she wasn't a cold, plastic sex-toy or, worse, simply his hand.

"Bridget's pissed." The Charizard muttered, tapping away a lengthy text message on her phone. He leaned over- covering his erroneously timed erection –and briefly read through some of the response messages.

"No. She's being understanding, as usual." He told her.

"You don't know Bridget like I do." Saedi hummed musingly. "Whenever she says- '_It's all gud gurl' _–she's about ready to put her head through a wall, or someone else's."

Bridget was Saedi's Salamence roommate down at the university dorms. They probably had yet another research project that needed doing, seeing as the two of them refused to partner with anyone else besides each other for those kinds of things.

Stacks of paperwork, all in pursuit of Saedi's dream of becoming a social worker.

Mitchell liked cars and graphic design involving them, and Saedi liked working with people.

So as it would figure: Mitchell had wasted his life and talent on work he'd never bothered to try and sell, and Saedi had wasted hers on a piece of shit.

That piece of shit was _him,_ just to clarify.

He wasn't stupid, he was just an asshole. He knew exactly what he had done to her.

But all that did was feed into the will to destroy himself. It was just part of the vicious cycle.

"We have a paper due soon, and there's a lot of work to do. I'll give her a night off when I get back, just to let her have a break from all this nonsense they keep putting us through. Half the things our professors have us researching don't even feel like they apply to anyone's mental wellbeing." Saedi spoke, monotone, not looking up from her phone. "And now I don't even know which direction I'm going. I started all of this because I wanted to work with children. Do you know what our professor said to me? He said: "_Your work really derives towards people listening to what YOU have to say, not them talking with you about THEIR problems. Maybe you should reconsider your elective, Saedi._" –And really, how can I help it if people are so stupid? If someone doesn't show up to tell them up from down, they wander around like sheep."

She glanced at him.

"Sheep don't know what a railroad crossing is. They try to eat the little grass blades right on the tracks, not moving, waiting to die. _Sheeple._ Bridget joked about it. Sheeple for people. Though I guess I have to give you credit, most Pokemon are worse."

He didn't realize when the conversation had melded to be about him again, but he couldn't blame her. What else really was there to talk about?

Mitchell didn't say anything and refused to make eye contact with her. He could feel her eyes boring into his forehead, right through his brown hair and then his dense skull. He looked at the towel covering her still somewhat wet flesh. Her tailplane illuminated the whole scene in a damp amber. It accentuated the womanly curvature modeling the Charizard's form with glowing, molten edges. Of course, at that second, Little Mitchell chose that moment to twitch.

Saedi's eyes immediately fell down to his groin, homing in on such a change in the territory she knew every spot of in an instant. Her expression was one he couldn't particularly read. The dragon snorted, and steam visibly wafted from her nostrils.

"What, Mitchell, you want me to fuck you?" She asked, defeated. "You want the _bitch_ to bend over and let you go to town?"

When he went to speak, she put a talon in his face.

"I just showered. Sorry." The couch creaked, and the bodacious fire-type sauntered back off towards the bedroom. Mitchell shivered as another bout of self-hatred crashed over him. He jolted when a pair of red pajama pants thwacked over his head. "I folded your laundry while I was back there, so you have plenty of un-wrinkled pairs of sleep pants ready to go. Honestly, Mitchell, I've been gone for, what, a few days? How'd you manage all this in such a short period of time? Your house is a mess, all your clothes were wrinkled, and just judging from my brief trip to your refrigerator, I'd place a good bet that you've been surviving on TV-dinners and frozen microwave bowls of eggs and sausage."

Mitchell peeled the sleep pants off his face and bundled them in his lap, shutting down the TV and sulking in the cushions. He couldn't even look at her.

"Well, I can say with confidence that it's all gone downhill in the time I was gone. If you think I'm going to take pity on you and not remind you that I told you so, you're wrong." Saedi harrumphed as she glanced around his little kitchen. "_I told you so._ Now, understand that I will never repeat what was said to me in kind. I will not call you names, I will not fight and argue with you. That's just a reminder between adults."

Mitchell took the artillery bombardment shell for shell. Again, he was bitter, but he wasn't stupid. He knew he was in the wrong, and he deserved every bit of what she had to say.

"So," The Charizard could be frightening when she wanted to be. Her tone immediately changed from grim and matter-of-factly, to a cheerful levity that should've followed a quaint sip of tea, or a moment taken on a park-bench during a sunny day. "I bet you were wondering long and hard about what you were going to do to get me to come back, make you dinner, clean the floors, set up your schedule, make your _everything_ appointments, and suck your dick. Congratulations, Mitchell. You've done it! Here I am, in the flesh, and I'll even give you whatever measure of comfort it might offer to say: I'm here to _stay._ It isn't a big deal! I was just under the assumption that my life had been uprooted the first time, and that it was up to me to start a new one. _But,_ because God's a fuckface, and he has a sense of humor: it looks like the new life just got uprooted too, and I had to revisit the time-capsule because I'm a glutton for punishment. I'm one lucky, lucky dragon."

She looked at him from across the bungalow, even managing to keep her face free of a glare as she did it. Mitchell wilted like a plant that had had acid poured on it.

Jesus.

Now he knew how _she_ felt when he cursed at her.

"You know what Mitchell,"

-Oh shit.

There was more.

"I always thought- and, god, I can't believe I'm just digging this up from under my tail now –I always thought that your father was the model of everything a man _shouldn't_ be." Saedi pointed a talon at him, smiling without an ounce of humor. Her snout was turning red, and the little wings over her shoulders were spastically twitching.

She was pissed.

"But you know what? This last year has changed my mind. You wanna' know what I think? Hm? You want to?" Saedi's skill in her ability to berate him into the ground cracked just like her voice did. She fought with her quivering lip and chattering fangs, managing to pull off the finisher despite her emotions' attempts to turn her into a blubbering mess again. "I-I think that-" –She sniffled. "-_I think,_ that I was looking at the wrong one of the two."

"You don't mean that." Mitchell quickly turned, looking at her over the sofa's spine.

"-_I- I-_" Saedi clenched it, held it, tried to fire it, and then lost it.

The Charizard growled, a literal flare of fire lighting up the kitchen as it bellowed from her nose and vanished into the air.

Her brow daggered hatefully, she turned away from him to scowl at her own crossed arms.

"Saedi-"

"It's time for bed." She stated. "Come on, get washed up, get changed. Tomorrow's a new day, a new beginning, and mark my words, Mitchell, things are about to _change_ in this house. Whether you want them to or not."

Mitchell sank back onto the sofa, melting among the cushions.

He didn't move.

Saedi sighed behind him, and he could hear her bladed foot tapping on the hardwood of his living room.

"Are you coming, or do I have to carry you out of _that_ too?" She sneered.

Mitchell leaped out of the couch and jogged to the bathroom. If he had a tail, Saedi would've seen it between his legs with the verbal thrashing she had in store for tonight. She wasn't wrong to do so too. After all, he'd called her a- a….

He couldn't imagine it anymore. It made his stomach twist.

* * *

[🍊]

The shower was… _empty. _But weren't they supposed to be?

Most people in the world showered alone consistently. He included. But memories of when he and Saedi were younger were flooding him tonight for some reason. Maybe it was because every time he lashed out at her, he felt like he was ripping and tearing at the only godsend he'd been gifted in his life.

It was more than guilt, it was something else. Mitchell tried not to think about it. But then again, his thoughts didn't stray to things much better. Normally, whenever his attempts failed, he would try to view a more positive light in anything. Thoughts revolving around all the progress he'd made, the chances he'd taken, and the rewards he'd reaped.

Socio-therapeutic crap like that. Stuff your therapist told you to do alongside breathing exercises and shouting "_NO!" _to yourself like a fucking retard. Mitchell hadn't been long of the blessed office of doctoring. Usually, people who tried to help made it worse, and folks with _degrees_ in "_Helping" _amplified that bullshittery.

Tonight was just a rock-bottom sort of night. Nobody just drained that much blood from their body on purpose and walked away without a twitch.

Maybe that was what he couldn't get over. The amount of blood. How did people have that much blood in their bodies? It was just his wrists, for Christ's sake. Did _that_ much blood pump through them all the time?

He stared at the stitches in wonder, where his flesh was still purple and discolored around the once ragged welts dealt by the knife.

Wait a second, where was that knife anyhow? It hadn't been in the drawer, on the floor, or in the sink.

Curious. Maybe a ghost ate it.

Wouldn't have surprised him either way. His life sucked enough dick for the impossible to happen.

Just like his asshole fag of a brother. He wondered what Rob was doing these days, or _who_ he was doing. Some of the same genes he had, had to have run down into his alley too. He didn't know Robert well enough to determine for himself, and he had better clue than their father did.

The subject of dick sucking inevitably made him antsy again. So, with the knife-wounds still fresh on his wrists he jerked off in the shower, thinking about Saedi, who was just a door and half-a-room away. His face never changed much, even after he fed the drain his load. He didn't really know what people talked about when it came to passion. Had he been a virgin, that probably would've sounded ignorantly naïve. He liked that it scared people more seeing as he _wasn't._

But hell did he miss it, passionless or not. That Charizard wasn't going anywhere near him after the stunt he'd pulled. And honestly, as someone who had always had too much of a thing for dragons, the thought of his buxom Pokemon never bending over for him again made him consider going for suicide attempt number _two._

Mitchell growled as he finished bathing, halfway because he was honestly pissed off at himself, and half because of how annoying jizz was to get off once it meshed in with the soap. Fucking mess. Not unlike so much else in his pitiful little existence.

He stepped back into the room barefoot later on, with his sleep pants covering his water-cooled skin. Saedi was in his bed. His king-sized bed that had barely been big enough for both of them when Saedi was still staying here most of the time. It had worked because Mitchell had basically been sleeping _on_ her instead of just beside her. His Charizard was like a giant, curvy pillow. Narrow waisted, fat-hipped, big-titted, and orange.

And she still smelled like a glass of orange juice, even after using his shower gel. Little Mitchell- unsatisfied –propped up yet again, and he found himself crossing the bedroom with a tent in his pants.

_God damn it._

"You think pointing at me with it is going to change my mind or something?" Saedi didn't look up from her phone as Mitchell stood by the side of the bed, his pecker beelining itself in a futile attempt to rip through the linen of his pajamas. When he didn't move, she spared him a sideways glance, her amber eyes narrowing at the hidden lump of his member. "Go to sleep, Mitchell."

"When was the last time we fucked anyway?" He asked, dry-throated.

"_Mitchell._" She snarled. He slipped under the blankets and turned away from her without another word.

Needless to say, in the coming silence, it was quite a squeeze. His arm and his leg were practically hanging off the side of the bed, and everything behind him was flush against the Charizard's toasty, scaly body. Saedi was like a portable heater, especially when she was inside during the Spring and Summer. She radiated heat that just worked so well with the plush squishiness of the fat distributed in all the right places. One of her boobs was practically rolling down the side of her ribcage like a gelatin bag. He could feel the large, umber-colored nipple pressing on the back of his shoulder.

He shifted uncomfortably, grinding his arm against her sensitive region. It was a _half-accident._ Suicidal or not, he still had very straight male urges. Having a colossal dragon-tit squashed against him wasn't making sleep come any easier.

Saedi shuttered, whether from the contact or the ghostly sigh leaving her fangs, he didn't know. The lamp on her side was the only light in the room on. He fiddled with his stitches as she kept clicking away at her phone, subsisting in the constant and dull ache the wounds continued to hammer him with.

He'd been strangely numb throughout most of the time since the transfusion. He supposed all the heat from the shower and his Charizard was relaxing his muscles. But he could deal with the agony there. Physical pain was nothing to him.

"…Mitchell," Saedi whispered after several minutes. She reached over and put her phone down on the nightstand. "You can't sleep like that."

"I know." He mumbled. He wasn't going to move unless she said he could. Even if it was his own friggin' bed. Authority was the last thing he deserved right now.

Saedi's gentle, caramel-clawed hands snaked under his ribs and pulled him through the sheets like he was weightless. The Charizard deposited him on her curvaceous belly, grunting as she scooted and jerked around, trying to spread her tiny wings from behind her shoulders, relieving them of the compact squishing they'd had to deal with.

Mitchell hugged her by reaction, wrapping his scrawny arms around the Pokemon's wide hips. His cheek was right against the edge of her ribcage, between her breasts. It was impossible for Little Mitchell to be under any semblance of control now. Saedi grumbled when he poked her right in the belly through his sleep pants, giving off a very low volume, but drawn out whining noise. He felt her thick dragon thighs constrict over his hips and lock him in place.

Innocently, he peered up at her through the trench of her own cleavage. His arms slid up her sides and clapped onto a boob each, making them jiggle.

"You were just waiting for the perfect opportunity, weren't you?" She blew steam through her fangs and glowered down at him. Mitchell simply scooted further up her body and kissed the side of her tit. Saedi gasped, her fin piercings clinking like little door ornaments as she leaned her neck back and touched the headboard.

"…Has it really been that long?" She asked.

Mitchell let his lips slide down her flesh, appearing stymied. He buried his face in her chest and muffled something incomprehensible. It was probably just a confirmation of her own fears.

"That's what I thought anyhow." She left a lot unspoken there. She probably wanted to ask aloud how she could shower him with so much affection and he still wanted to end his life. How could she literally help him live, bring him home, and offer her body to him in any kind of way he wanted, and _still_ he wished for…?

"Go to sleep." The Charizard shivered, not out of arousal, but out of loss. "Mitchell?" She looked down and frowned at the messy, brown top of his head. Muffled snores came out from her chest. She supposed just her presence was enough these days. She hadn't slept with him in weeks, so the buildup had to be pretty intense.

She picked at his hair and stared holes into the ceiling. A brief flare of her nostril reminded her that the bungalow stunk, and it was yet another problem she'd invariably have to fix.

But those problems could wait until morning. Right now, she needed to worry about how in the hell she planned on falling asleep with so much on her mind.

It wasn't every day your lover and best friend tried to off themselves.

No, for poor Saedi, at least Mitchell had the decency to wait a few months before he invariably tried again. You couldn't overdo it, lest you risk straining everyone involved, right?

* * *

[🍊]


	3. Chapter 3 - Past Life

**Smell the Oranges**

**3**

* * *

**Past Life**

* * *

"_-Eeew,_ it's still twitching." Joe sneered, prodding out with the stick again. The squirrel made a horrific, squeaking noise and hissed at him when he stuck the jagged end inside the wound. The animal had dragged itself across the whole of the lane and had just met the sidewalk by the time he had found it and started poking it like it was a test subject in some sick experiment. "You want to poke it too, Mitch?"

Mitchell just shook his head and stayed on the outskirts of the exchange, kicking pebbles off the sidewalk, occasionally sparing the dying animal a glance as the other boy tortured it.

"It looks like it got hit by something real big." Robert knelt beside the rodent, sniggering under his breath. Every time he smiled, the dimples he had came out in full light. Their mother used to think they were cute. Mitchell hated them because he only saw them when Robert was having a good time. Robert only had a good time when something else was miserable. "You think like an SUV or…?"

"That shit's from an eighteen-wheeler, forget anything else." Joe twisted the stick into the ragged remnants of the squirrel's rear legs. It shivered once and didn't move. "And I think I got its guts on my sole. Shit."

"Well, look at what you did. It's dead! It ain't no more fun anyways." Robert spat, standing up. "C'mon, Mitch, if you don't move your ass we're gonna' miss the ten showing."

"I'm coming." Mitchell watched the dead squirrel as the trio passed it, and Joe tossed his stick into a gutter. He fixated on the crimson, browning stain that spread from where the animal had been hit to where it currently sat. Its eyes were still open, and its teeth bared. It looked more vicious in death than it had in life.

"So, you doing anything after the movie, Joe?" Robert asked.

"No, why?" Joe flicked his blonde hair from his face, watching the only car on the street that night pass down the road sluggishly. The years would prove unkind to then little Joe Miskozy. He had always been an ugly son of a bitch before the addiction to cocaine did him in just a month after the boys graduated school. But back then, at the here and now, he still had some good looks underneath all the dirt on his cheeks and the grease in his hair. It was enough for Robert, even before he understood exactly what was happening to his own identity.

"You wanna' hang out after the movie?" Robert pressed.

"Why?"

"I dunno', I think you're a cool guy."

"You're so gay, Rob." Mitchell grunted.

Robert swung on his heel and punched his brother in the face. Mitchell toppled like a pile of bricks, nursing a bruised cheek and a bloody lip, his sneakers clapping on the sidewalk with the sharpness of gunshots.

"Don't call me that!" Robert shouted. "Just shut up, you little pussy. I bet you've never even been laid."

"One of us hasn't." Mitchell gripped at his face on the ground, staring daggers at Rob through the darkness enveloping the street. Mitchell rarely cried when he was a child. It took a lot to even get a quiver from his lower lip.

Robert kicked him in the ribs and snarled something unintelligible, grabbing Joe by the arm and yanking him away.

"C'mon, man, forget him." Rob sneered. "We'll go by ourselves."

"Whatever." Joe chuckled, shrugging the other boy's arm away.

Mitchell watched them until they rounded a corner, and the street lamps failed to illuminate them in the surreal yellow light they provided. Nothing but darkness, row houses, and the distant-sounding of car horns.

Oh, and the dead squirrel Joe poked to finality with that stick.

Mitchell stared at the corpse just down the sidewalk for a while, still lying on the pavement. He snorted and righted himself, dusting off his jacket and his long brown hair. Normally, he'd be checking his phone and swiping through mounds of distractive bullshit. But this was 1996, touch-screen phones hadn't been on the market then and wouldn't be for several years.

He pulled out the little HotWheels car- a 1968 Camaro model in deep red –that he kept on his keychain, and fiddled with the tiny wheels, walking the opposite way to start heading for home. He gave the squirrel a wide berth, shoving his chain back in his pocket and sighing heavily.

Their rowhouse wasn't too far away from Calif Avenue. It was just past the abandoned section of homes with the wrecked Mercedes in the fifth driveway and the little Frankfurt Park that literally nobody in the area used. Well, except for kids smoking pot and hiding it from their parents between semesters, and that Gallade and his partner who came there every Saturday to practice moves on the wreckage of what had once been the playground jungle gym.

Mitchell was too isolated really to pursue any kind of meaningful pastimes at this age. Other kids either made him angry, pushed him around like Rob did or shunned him because they thought he was- '_Gross' –_or something.

If he'd been older, it probably would've bothered him more. But having friends, and, most of all, _girlfriends,_ rarely sparked anything in him seeing as he had-

"_Gotchya'~!_"

Mitchell stumbled forwards when something indescribably warm and large pounced on him from an alleyway. His attacker hollered in excitement, and a pair of arms tipped with talons wrapped around his chest and held on tightly.

The boy smiled for the first time that evening and hugged Saedi's arms against his chest, turning his head over to bop his cheek against the Charmeleon's stubby snout.

"I got you, Mitch." She stuck her tongue out at him, her tail flame illuminating the street amber as it swished to and fro behind them.

"You got me!" Mitchell cheered for her. "How did you know where I was?"

"I wasn't following you or anything." Saedi didn't attempt to mask her lie as she stepped off him. The Charmeleon was just a head shorter than him at this point. She gave a fang-filled smile and punched him on the arm. "And I certainly wasn't planning on jumping into the theater and plopping my lizardy butt right next to yours in the dark."

"You could've come too." He defended.

"Not with Rob." She hummed, her tone matching little to her statement. "Sooooo, what happened? Why'd your brother knock you over this time?"

"I called him gay." Mitchell shrugged, gesturing for her to walk with him.

"Oh, _that_ again." Saedi nodded, folding her arms over her chest and waddling beside him. She peered at the bruise on his cheek over her only winter gear. She had a little red scarf she used to wear back then. It was tightly wrapped around her neck and shoulders, its loose end fluttering in a slight breeze overtaking the street. "I can't really say I blame him too much. You shouldn't be so mean to him."

"He's the one who can't control himself." Mitchell rolled his eyes. "You know, the other day, he started playing N64 with me, and because he lost, he threw a full cup of soda at me. Who does that?"

"Rob does that." Saedi giggled. "He's your brother, Mitch, you both love each other anyhow, right?"

Mitchell didn't answer her. He just shoved his hands in his pockets and huffed, licking away the last of the blood on his lip.

"I didn't want to see that stupid movie anyway."

"Now I _know_ that's a lie." Saedi hummed, rubbing her flank all over him like a cat seeking attention. Her cute little lizard head popped up from the crease between his elbow and his hip. She stuck her tongue out at him, and he laughed as he leaned down and gave her a kiss on the nose. "-_Mitch~!_" –She cried, tearing out of his arms and blushing furiously. "I hate when you do that!"

"I know _that's_ a lie." He countered. "And really, it's fine. I don't need a movie to have a good night."

"But Metal Char is your favorite superhero." She shook her head. "You have all her comics, and that poster over your bed. That lewd, crude and _revealing_ poster-"

"Shut up." He play-shoved her. Saedi giggled even louder than before. "It's just a stupid poster I found in the thrift store for like two bucks."

"Soooo, you like Charizards, there's nothing wrong with that, _Mitchie'._"

"Don't call me that." He groaned. "Mom doesn't even call me that anymore."

_'Cause mom is never home._

"But you do like Charizards, right?" Saedi pressed, watching him as they stopped at a crosswalk, waiting for the red hand to blink away for the little green man. "They're your favorite Pokemon out of the whole bunch. Why else would you have brought me home, huh?"

"They're… okay." He shrugged. Saedi gawked with mock offense.

"Just _o-kay?!_ Your room is like a giant Metal Char book cover plastered over a panorama! You don't just sell yourself short after all that."

"What's the big deal about it, Saedi? She's just a cool superheroine who I look up to." Mitchell gestured to the dark, grungy streets surrounding them. "At least she's above all… _this._"

"Above what? The _Hood?_" Saedi sniggered. "Yeah, I guess kicking supervillain butt helps along your paycheck enough for it."

"Careful how loud you say that."

"The part about the balls-deep salary, or the _HOOD~?_" –She shouted, cackling when he stuffed his sleeve into her chops. "Alright! Alright, I give!"

The safety sign changed. No cars were there to stop anyhow as they crossed, the Charmeleon practically skipping beside him.

"Soooo, maybe you and me can go to the movies sometime instead."

Mitchell glanced over at her and examined how she looked. Saedi had her snout lowered and a half-smile half-frown over her features. Her fangs were chattering. Back then, of course, he never understood what particularly had her so nervous.

Nowadays, he could kick himself for not seeing signs even a moron could pick out. But back then the taboo of what was becoming of them didn't reveal itself so obviously. It didn't compute in his young mind, even with the crush he had on the racially different superhero of his dreams.

Back then it was the 90's slum banks of San Locisco. The last thing on Mitchell's worry list was the potential emotional tsunami brewing inside his Pokemon. It was only much later, around when he hit age 15, and Saedi 17, that her body started to fill out, and she evolved, and the two of them started to touch one another.

Right now was one of the last memories he had of the _Innocence Period,_ right before things had taken a turn for the best, and subsequently collapsed into a turn for the worst possible outcome imaginable.

"J-Jeez', it's c-cold out here." Saedi chattered, smiling as she hugged her scarf and gazed lovingly up at him. "I was tailing you guys the whole time you were out. Just a lonely little Charmeleon out on the streets in the frigid winter…"

"Who told you to leave the house without your coat?"

"I hate that coat, Mitch! It looks like a little doggie sweater you'd put on Fido during Christmas. They design Pokemon coats like crap." Saedi shivered. "S-So what about that movie?"

"Yes, we can go." Mitchell opened the side of his jacket, and Saedi squeaked cutely as she threw herself inside his apparel and hugged him closely, burying her snout in his armpit. He always kept up on his hygiene. So it smelled like the deodorant brand he used. Somewhat citrus-_ie. _Perhaps that was where Saedi first started to get her style going. Even though she was his senior by two years, she was still smaller than him in her lesser evolution. Having _Mitchell-Rides_ was a highlight of her days.

"I get to go to the movies with my Mitchell." The Charmeleon muffled happily. "Carry me!"

Mitchell hooked his arms and grunted when she tossed off her feet and landed in them, giggling like a little school girl as she wrapped his coat around them and bundled into his scrawny chest.

"Here, I can warm you up too." Saedi shoved her tail flame inside the coat, and the biological fire flickered harmlessly against his shirt inside. Now, Mitchell looked like a walking lantern with the light billowing inside his coat-tent. "Is that better, Mitchell?"

"Yeah." He leaned down and pecked her between the eyes. Saedi practically had a meltdown of hysterics inside his coat, sounding like a panicking sheep as she meekly covered her snout to try and hide the blush.

"H-Hey, Mitchell?"

"Yes, Saedi."

"I love you lots."

"I love you t-"

Outside the family home, Mitchell could already hear it. Muffled, prevalent shouting and the heavy thud of a table being flipped over. The lights from the front door and windows flooded from the porch across the little lawn. Every so often, a pair of shadows would flicker across the orange plains and vanish on the other side.

Glass broke, and the high pitched shriek of his mother's voice pierced the night.

His father must have been drinking _again._

"Oh no, now what?" Saedi grumbled, puffing her cheeks and peaking over the neckline of his jacket.

"Dad's drunk." Mitchell said nonchalantly. "I guess that means we're outside for longer."

"_Mitchell,_ is that you?" An elderly lady peered out from the neighboring home's front door, reading spectacles perched on her tiny little nose. The wafting scent of cat piss immediately invaded the street, and a pair of tabbies whisked outside to further their business past the crone's ankles. "Do you need me to call the police again?"

"I'm not going inside right now, Ms. Doetid, but thanks." Mitchell smiled politely, bouncing Saedi in his arms as she peered at the older lady from his coat. "I'll be back in a little while. If they're still screaming, then yeah, the cops might need a ring."

"Be safe, Mitchell." Ms. Doetid held a thumbs up and jammed a cigar in her mouth before letting the rickety screen door slam behind her. Typical lifetime resident old lady of San Locisco's mixed neighborhoods. That crusty bag wouldn't blink at an assault rifle being leveled in her face.

Crusty, but kind-hearted to folks.

As long as you weren't Asian, however. Ms. Doetid was a bigot if there ever was one, hollering up storms about no-good gooks.

But then again, everyone in Mitchell's old neighborhood hated somebody for the pure reasons of hating. Color, race, and species were all mixed together in a great old mess of distention and fury.

It was one of the reasons he'd moved all the way to the other coast as soon as he'd been old enough. It didn't help that his parents would later have followed him. He had always planned to grab Saedi and get her the hell out of there with no attachments whatsoever.

"You wanna' go see that movie?" He asked her as he walked them away from his loud, lit-up house.

"But isn't your brother still there-"

"Let's go to the theater by Arby's."

"Okay!" Saedi nuzzled him and licked his chin. "We can't have you missing out on Metal Char, can't we? And now, I have you all to myself."

Mitchell chuckled as the lizard's tongue swept over his chin. A little girlie kiss. Something so innocent, that they started out with.

"My Mitchell."

_And now, he had to wake up, and forget this beautiful moment._

* * *

[🍊]

Mitchell came to with a tiny jolt. His skin was molten with sweat but was cold at the same time. He instinctively reached out and clenched all the empty sheets he was swaddled in.

Empty.

"_Saedi…?_" –He groggily asked.

Tossing himself from the blankets, he hissed when sunlight blared in his face from his bedroom window. The blinds were wide open, all the way to the top of the rim. He never drew them up these days because he rarely got out of bed when he didn't absolutely need to.

Waking up to his room being alight, and opening his drawers to find the usual whirlwind mess of underwear and shirts inside neatly folded in piles of squares was disorienting. The smell of something cooking stabbing him in the nose was even more so.

Lumbering like the undead from his room, he shouldered his door aside and gazed into his little kitchen.

Hunched over the comparatively tiny counter was a curvy Charizard several times his size. Her big tail was idly sweeping the floor in bored loops, occasionally brushing against the legs of the two kitchen chairs behind her. She was wearing a pair of exercise pants and a sweatshirt that he didn't remember her having. Straining, gray-colored articles of clothing that barely kept her femininity concealed. He saw that she hadn't even slipped her tail through the third hole in the back of the pants, and so they were riding up its base, revealing the tops of her jiggly, orange ass-cheeks to the morning light.

"Yes, hello, I'm calling in reference to a patient named Mitchell Hoems, he has an appointment today at 10:00 AM? Yes, I can hold."

Saedi sounded like a completely different person when she was on the phone. She didn't even glance at him as she shouldered her cellphone, and flipped her wrist, giving the eggs simmering in the pan before her a good swish across the surface of the metal.

Mitchell walked over to her and peered past her flank at the eggs, he brushed her with his face and stuck his nose in the gap between her arm and her chest, inhaling her normal citrus scent like an addict.

"Hi, Samantha, it's Saedi~. How are you, babe?" Saedi took a claw off the panhandle to wave him away dismissively like she was shooing an errant fruit fly. "I'm okay. You know, the usual toil and grind of school life. It's actually going pretty well. I mean, it could be going _better…_"

Mitchell winced as he- downtrodden –paced over to the table and took his usual seat, waiting for breakfast like a good suicidal little shit.

"-That's why I'm calling, he's under the weather and won't be able to make it today. I hope you understand." Saedi cupped the receiver and nodded her snout at the fridge. "_Can you get out the bacon, please~?_" –She mouthed, and Mitchell almost tripped over his own foot to get on it. "I'm glad to hear it's no trouble. I don't know when at the moment, we're going to have to leave it open. Uh-huh. No. Good to hear, Samantha. Okay, have a good day, honey, you too, buhbye."

**_Click-_** went her phone.

Mitchell cautiously placed the defrosted bacon strips on the counter and fidgeted with his fingers before daring to speak.

"You didn't have to make me breakfas-"

"Yes hi, I'm calling in reference to an estimate on a door replacement." Saedi had the phone up to her fin again, smiling professionally as she deposited the eggs on a pair of plates with her little spatula. "Oh that's okay, take your time, sir."

"Saedi, I-"

**_Crssshkkk~! _**–she ripped open the bacon packaging with those wicked talons. The sound made him shiver in his own skin and he backed off.

"Yes, hello. My name's Saedi, I called yesterday about the little door incident? Yes, how are you? Good. Well, you see, my boyfriend lives in a little one-person bungalow and his door got ripped right off its hinges. Yessir, right through the wood, he spent all night picking up the pieces." The Charizardess sounded like she was chirping as she described the horrors of the previous night. She scraped most of the pan clean and- holding it on the scalding underside –bobbed it over the sink until all the egg shreds fell out.

Cooking was certainly more of an easy task when you were a fire-type and you didn't have to worry about getting scorched.

As she laid the bacon strips in one at a time, they started to spit at her, and one of the blazing droplets of oil snagged her right on the forearm.

She didn't even look at it before she raised her arm up and licked it away like it was a cool drop of dew. She resumed her conversation on the phone right after.

"I'm just calling about the time on Monday, is there a way we can push that forwards to Tuesday? Our schedule's gone a little haywire. …Mmhmm. Yes. That sounds like a perfect time for the estimate. Of course." She listed off his address again and confirmed the hour precisely, before bidding the other end goodbye with a **_Click_**. "Ugh, the moment you're a woman, those contractors become so patronizing."

The dragon glanced at the table, as if just remembering Mitchell was there. Her smile was wide, but ultimately cardboard.

"Good morning, Mitchell. How did you sleep?" She sang in her usual chipper mood.

"Mmkay." He grunted, scratching at his hair. "Did you make a clothes trip or something?"

Saedi paused as she bustled over to the table and deposited the plates. She looked down at herself and giggled, adjusting her shirt to strain her weighty breasts against it, no doubt to intentionally drive him up a wall.

"When you were still in the E.R." She shrugged like it was a piece of unimportant gossip. "I thought- perhaps against my better judgment –that they might keep you for a few nights, and so I had some clothes sitting in my car. Now I get to use them here. But at least they weren't wasted~."

The last part of that sentence came out sing-song. Mitchell winced when the plate smacked sharply on the table underneath his chin. The Charizardess swept to the other side and engulfed the poor chair there with her colossal backside. He could hear the legs straining even from where he was.

But that was why he had bought those chairs, so long ago, on a shoestring budget. They were tough things, garden chairs really, meant for outdoor activities with legs of metal. He had never been able to afford Poke-size chairs specifically built for the larger species.

Saedi had always made due when she used to stay here, kind of like now, cooking him meals, sitting and watching movies with him on the couch, playing that old copy of Scrabble that had been sitting unused in his coat closet for over a year, and, of course, having raunchy, interspecies sex with him in almost any room of the bungalow.

Mitchell recalled the freedom of being able to screw in the kitchen. Normally, it was people with children who had to worry about things like that being taken away. How had it all come to that when it was still just two souls in the little bungalow?

"Those eggs aren't going to eat themselves."

Mitchell blinked, startled, as Saedi's voice found its way through his defenses. She was chewing quaintly over a mouthful of her own cooking, not even sparing him the time of day as she clicked away at her little phone.

"Why'd you push the estimate back?" Mitchell picked up a little plastic fork and toyed with the edge of his egg pile. Saedi always cooked in _Pokeportions._ So of course, the eggs on his plate were enough for one Charizard, but one Charizard had the appetite of a freaking platoon. Add in the bacon, and you had a schmorgesborg that was as big as his head.

A few years ago, this would've been perfect.

When did he stop loving his Charizard's cooking?

As he popped a forkful in his face and chewed slowly, he remembered. _Never._ The problem was, he was a cunt, and he had driven her off like one. Can't exactly reap the benefits of someone else's goldmine.

That estimate. Focus.

"Did you hear me?" Saedi huffed, putting down her phone. She had her chin on her knuckles as she ate, glaring at him with this passive-aggressive kind of expression. He figured Saedi was so positively angry that she couldn't even look a certain way without tens of other emotions shoving in to have their part.

"Say it again, please, I'm sorry." He croaked.

"I pushed it back because I _felt like it._" Which was a peeved woman's fancy way of saying; _your schedule is mine, you depraved, up-the-ass-taking little bitch, and you'll deal with it purely because I say so. _"It clashes with your time stamp on Monday that I have worked out. We can't have that, so I bumped it."

"What other plans did you make?"

Saedi didn't immediately answer him. Her eyes were glazing over the floor nearby the stove where all the blood had been. There were ghosts in her pupils like she was having visions of what would always have been there until the day this house became dust.

"Do you see that?"

Mitchell swallowed a last mouthful of eggs when her phone was shoved in his face. It was a small PNG image that she had opened up from some browser window or a file path.

He didn't even know that dinosaur could save images. And he wasn't talking about the dragon herself in such poor taste.

"What is it?" He asked stupidly, his eyes darting around a colorful poster board with little pixilated people gathered around a table, with a sunny afternoon blooming in the window overlooking them. He knew exactly what it was. He was just being difficult again.

"_Mitchell-_" She started to growl.

"I'm sorry, I know what it is." He coughed, wiping his lips with a napkin. "You want me to go to group therapy?"

"It's the first step in our new plan." The Charizardess swept her fin piercings with a flick of her wrist and brought her phone back, tapping a few more keys as her eyes lingered across the tiny screen.

"We have a new plan?"

"Of course we do." She smiled briefly. "A new plan to get your life in working order, I reckon. Last night was very instructive for me, so after all that happened, I should actually be thanking you somewhat."

"Huh." He almost dropped his fork. "I don't think I understa-"

"You're not required to understand." Saedi informed him very curtly, putting her phone down again and for good this time as she ate the last of her breakfast. "This is all being put into action by _me,_ and only me. Because as our lives have proven, incompetence runs in your blood, and I will not sit by and allow it to destroy the only person in your family worth saving. Starting later this afternoon, we're going with _Plan B._"

"Plan… _B?_" He asked dryly. There was probably meant to be a lot of weight behind what she was saying, but Mitchell was drunk on dread twenty-four-seven. There wasn't much that he did every day that wasn't just for the sake of going along with it and hoping a car ran him down at the first opportunity.

What most people didn't realize, was that the life of someone broken rarely revolved around horrid, swirling images of shadowy doom and cackling madness.

Usually, it was a lot of sitting around with the feeling that the world was turning without you, and that nobody was looking back for you. Cries for help were overrated when humanity (and by extension, _Pokemanity_) was deaf. Nobody in the world handled someone else's despair properly.

That was why, if nothing else, Saedi's proclamation made him more anxious than angry or bothered.

The weird thing with such deep-seated depression was that other emotions constantly got blended in with the more entrenched consistencies of anger, hatred, loathing, and madness. You knew that you loved the people trying to help you. But you watched as your body did what it wanted through a glass wall. The horror of being eaten alive inside was the lows you had to observe _yourself_ sink to, before the actions of anyone else.

The drive to end one's own life was, at its core, an obvious self-deconstruction of everything good you had accomplished. It was hard to recover from that nagging knowledge that you were never getting better. Many would say: _impossible._

"Plan B." Saedi gave her first genuine smile in a long, damned time. Mitchell felt his chest ache as his heart swelled at the sight. Something about how that smile would spread down Saedi's snout to the edges of her jaw was just… fantastic to him.

Saedi was beautiful all the time, but she wasn't just beautiful: she was _beau-ti-ful _when she was happy. She had such an elegant, yet pudgy face all at the same time. It was lithe, like her arms and her ankles, sinewy and prehensile, to match her draconic and long neck.

Forgetting some of the darker stuff for just a second; could someone fall in love with the same person twice? Fuck yes.

"Luckily for both of us, school's taught me the art of deeper knowledge." Saedi nodded down at her phone and scooped up the last bite on her plate, speaking muffled over bacon-mush. "We're going with this as a learning experience and a beginning of the end."

"End of what?" He asked sourly.

"An end of your _crisis_, not your life. Rigorous scheduling and dietary habits are going to pull you through it all, Mitchell. And I'm going to be there for every step of the way, as it is." Saedi hummed some real laughter, and her wings flapped behind her as she gave him a cutesy edge of her shoulders. The world could be ending, and that dragoness could lighten the mood. "What do you say to that?"

"I need to go to the bathroom."

* * *

[🍊]

Mitchell was sure to lay his face on the edge of the cool porcelain making his bathroom sink as he sat on the bowl. The only upside to having a bathroom smaller than Mighty Mouse's shitter was that you could be drunk as fuck, and technically, you could never really teeter over.

The toilet was against your ass, a sink was basically jutting into your lap and the toiletries cabinet that he'd picked up at a flea market years ago was there to catch your elbow. No sweat and no chance. At least until you teetered towards the shower, which was a little farther away to the right. But there was a nice unwashed shag rug to soften your fall should that have happened.

Did his bathroom always stink this badly?

**_Fttttt~ _**-Mitchell allowed himself a weak chuckle into the sink's porcelain ribs. At least he hadn't come in here to vomit. Wasting Saedi's cooking was like taking the Holy Grail and pissing in it right under Jesus' nose.

_How's that fairing for you, Christ? You absent-living cocksucker._

Mitchell flushed and got around cleaning himself up. He took as long as was possible for washing his hands and paused at the bathroom door back to his room.

Saedi's premonitions had him on edge. Plan B? How long had she been conjuring that up last night? And could she have been planning it for longer? He and she hadn't had much contact for the last month since her semester had started, and she'd moved into on-campus housing with Bridget.

Some of that was because of the fact that she was tired of sharing what was clearly a one-person home (and a one-_human_ sized home at that) with him all the time, but she had mostly left because of a fight they'd had.

Granted, before she split, Mitchell hadn't tried to hurt himself for the better half of a year. His old self-employment as a graphic designer falling through had done the trick, and while he was basically living off of his own content royalties at this point, the inability to solely sustain himself on his own passion had been… catastrophically bad.

Combine that with throwing out the only love of his life, and the fact that his family had left him for dead, and you had a prime possibility for a _Let's Tie a Belt around my Throat and Squeeze! _–shitshow to unfold.

Damn it, he fucking hated being alive. He betted Robert didn't have to deal with this shit. Everything he'd said about him- while hurtful –was painfully true.

That fucking faggot.

Fuck him.

Mitchell felt his brow twitch as the echoes of his own father rippled throughout himself. He was keen on stamping out any hint of his gene-doner's essence whenever it cropped up. It was one of the reasons he rarely drank, too. But in contrast to dad and Rob:

Mitchell was a bumfuck loser, leeching off the ooey-gooey love of his Charizard girlfriend. The only person in the literal world who gave a rat's ass about him and this was how he treated-

**_Crk-eeeeekk- _**he threw the door open and stopped in the arch. Saedi was sitting on the foot of his bed, pulling on her sandals, her tail brushing through all the sheets as she worked between fixing her footwear and adjusting the strap of her bra.

She certainly wasn't making this abstinence easier.

This was probably the first of many stiffies he was going to have to suffer through today.

-By the way, since when did depression make him so horny? Every five minutes it felt like, Captain Johnson was springing to attention like an annoying bastard high on caffeine.

"The good news is, the first thing I had planned today isn't starting for the next hour, and it's only twenty minutes away. So we have time to get ready." Saedi was either oblivious to or ignoring the concentrative indecisiveness he was currently suffering. She arched her magnificent back as she craned her arms to work on the strap of her boulder-holder, pushing out the twin creamy globes adorning her chest so much that the cups covering their ducts strained. "You're not seriously just going to stand there and not help me with this, are you?"

Mitchell coughed with what sounded like the fender of a car being slammed by a sledgehammer. He hurried over and jumped onto the bed, kneeling behind her as he clasped the little hook on the back of the black, oversized bra and latched it into place.

"Busty girls have it the _worst._" Saedi clicked her tongue, resting her foot on her knee to play with her sandal, her caramel-taloned toes wriggling. "They rarely have an exact size at the stores you happen to find, and on top of it, it kills your back. I mean, look at me. A Charizard in her mid-twenties? Where's the mercy? I certainly didn't get any at the evolutionary table. Do you remember, a few years ago just after high school-" –She giggled. "-and it was, I dunno', eleven-o-clock on a Wednesday night? And I had you run into Macy's looking for my cup size, and- *_snicker* -_you asked the lady behind the counter, if they carried-"

Saedi was losing her composure as she squinted her face from the hysterics, struggling to contain her laughter.

"-You asked her if they carried: _Big dragon-momma size Double-Z landslide stoppers~!_" The Charizard let reams of soot curl through her teeth as she howled in musing, pinching between her eyes and rocking on the bed. "-_And I couldn't believe you actually said that to her~!_"

Mitchell let go of the straps and hung his hands by his sides as he watched her crack herself up. He smiled, and summarily shuddered when it felt like someone hacked at a wall of ice that hadn't been touched in millennia.

Mitchell hummed a little as he doted on his Pokemon, watching her calm down and brush not tears of despair, but ones of joy, from her eyes, and this time _before_ she put on mascara to ruin.

Before he knew what was happening, his hands were back on the straps, and the hook slipped metallically from its roost. Saedi jolted like she had when he had snapped at her in the hospitable room, her laughter abruptly silencing itself in place for a low whistle of air. She was quiet as the bra slouched over her sizable dragoness-chest, and Mitchell's smaller hands worked circles around her scapulas, just above the wing joint, because he knew she liked it there.

Saedi's breathing became uneven, and her wings spread out, a reaction Charizards had when they were presenting themselves, preening to be as large as possible when they felt… aroused by a known mate.

Mitchell was on autopilot. He leaned forwards and nestled his face into her carotid, inhaling reams of the sweet citrus smell she always had. He thumbed her muscles quaintly and with a trained hand, becoming a completely different person in the blink of an eye.

His Charizardess was arching her mighty back, her breasts drooping like uninstructed clay over the tantalizingly defined edge of her ribcage. Mitchell slid his hands under her wiry arms and hitched his thumbs on her waist, allowing his fingers to slide over the soft paunch of her belly, where it was slightly rounded, as to properly adjust for the carrying of eggs.

"-_M-Mitchell…._" Saedi murmured, quivering as he wedged his thin hips into the gap between the base of her juicy, thick tail and the orange globe that was her butt cheek. The little thin pair of panties down there did nothing to block the obvious girth of his dick poking her in the honeypot. The dragon rumbled deeply in her chest, and by instinct, the rest of her huge tail swirled up onto the bed and began to orbit him again, and again, until it had completely snaked around his body and entrenched him to drag him as close to her as possible.

Mitchell bit her neck and dry-humped her in a growing frenzy to relive something that he had taken away from himself for so long. Saedi was becoming comatose as any shreds of humor she had left abandoned her system, and her aching body longed for her recently absent mate to breed her.

Saedi grit her fangs and gasped, her tongue popping out and slithering in the air as heat overtook her veins. The beginnings of a fervent coat of perspiration began to glisten her creamy and orange scales.

He dragged the center strap of the panties to the side, fighting with the tail hole to snap it over one of her colossal flesh-globes and free up her forbidden grove for his choosing. Mitchell had a thumb hooked under his pajamas rim…

Suddenly, Saedi gasped loudly.

Her tail uncoiled from him in one swift motion. It swung from the left and batted him off his own bed with the ease of a bundled newspaper besieging a little house spider.

**_Thwack~! _**–and Mitchell sailed across the room and tumbled on his ass onto the floor, dazed and confused, sporting a twitching, unsatisfied boner that painfully tented his sleepwear.

Shaking his head, he looked up at see Saedi struggling to hook her bra herself, and basically undo everything he'd fought through over the last minute or so. She turned her nose up to him as she fixed her little panties and swept her piercings from her face. She stood up, flicked her tail, and hugged herself protectively, glancing down at him over the fleshy mounds of her dragon boobs.

"W-Whatever it is you think we've reconciled," She stammered, her claw quivering as she reached over and snatched her purse off his nightstand. "you're telling yourself lies, Mitchell Hoems. We have work to do today. Get dressed and meet me outside when you're ready."

When he curled up in a ball and didn't respond, she nudged his knee with her sandal.

"Move your ass, since you're so concerned about mine."

Then she stepped into the foyer. Mitchell heard her scoff at the wreck that was the front door before she crossed the bungalow and found her exit. The back slammed shut, and he was alone in his house again, like normal.

_No,_ he clawed at his hair and shivered to suppress a sob. _This is anything but normal._

* * *

[🍊]


End file.
